Saturday, August 27, 2016

I put back the term Eurotrash in my top ten post. In my mind Regie
Theater and Eurotrash are not synonyms. All Eurotrash is Regie but not
all Regie is Eurotrash. Some of it is actually good. The word regie
just means direction or staging. The director is the regisseur.

Regie Theater is a more definable term than Eurotrash. It refers to
productions, primarily from Europe but not always, which move the time
to something like the present day. Other traits are imposing a story on
the opera which is different from the actual story of the opera; adding
sexual activity; assigning symbolic meanings to objects and actions.
Eurotrash is in the eye of the beholder.

It is an argument to have whether or not it is possible to have a modern
opera with a Regietheater production. You can't move it to the present
because it already is there. If you add a lot of fake sex, that might
qualify.

As a result of this argument, I have added a new label--Regie--and added it to the Filters section. It's best if labels are kept short. This
label has been applied to over 100 reviewed productions on this blog. If
you are interested in this subject at all, select the label to see what
I think is Regie theater.

In attempting to distinguish between regie and Eurotrash my argument was that the top 10 regie productions would be a completely different list, so here it is. These are my personal favorites in the extreme production area based entirely on how much I enjoyed them. You will have to choose your own. I notice, now that I have selected, that this list is quite varied and comes from all parts of the operatic world.

Gounod's Faust from the Salzburg Festival streamed today on medicitv. It came in a regie production, as you can see in the picture above. There were many images to choose from, but I have chosen the Rien neon which began and ended the opera. One puzzles briefly at the start, and then Faust opens his mouth and sings "Rien," French for nothing. Of course. I have reached Faust's age and listen to his complaining with now more sympathetic ears. He effectively transforms from a bald old man to a young man with hair.

The white daisies Siebel gives as a bouquet in act III are called Marguerites.

Everything is symbolic. I have no idea of what. Abstract shapes that look like nothing at all seem preferable to people in a laboratory for no apparent reason. Half of the tunes are hit tunes. I can listen to Pique Dame and recognize very little of the music, while Faust is ever familiar. The music is intensely nostalgic, a style that grows old for us. Perhaps a meaningless modernist staging takes away from the nostalgia and makes the music tolerable again. I actually enjoyed this, an excellent concert with pictures. The pictures were sometimes odd, but the story line stayed in tact. Except maybe the baby as a box wrapped as a present.

Maria Agresta gave us a strong Marguerite capable of soaring over the orchestra and chorus. Ildar was perfection as Méphistophélès, growly and nasty. Piotr was pleasing. They could only have cast Tara because they wanted her soft sweetness to contrast with the angry brother and the evil Méphistophélès.

It is a Faust for today.

___________
P.S. I was reading a review of this production today which covered each of the usual subjects one by one--conducting, orchestra playing, each singer's performance and the production. Then it suddenly turned into a religious commentary. Faust is a Christian morality tale. The lesson is that the devil can do nothing to prevent your salvation. From a Christian perspective Faust is the essential opera. We were scolded for our lack of interest in it.

Beginning in 1862 it became the most frequently performed opera in the repertoire for a long period. Since its premier at the Met in 1883, it has played hundreds of performances, but recently has declined in popularity. My sense of this is that while people seem never to grow tired of Puccini, Gounod is another matter entirely. The music begins to sound corny to us.

It is my understanding that this opera didn't sell well in Salzburg. I don't think lecturing us about Christian themes will save it.

Sunday, August 21, 2016

My post about Eurotrash was removed from an online site. They don't allow the term. You are required to call everything regietheater. I realize that there are people that call everything that moves the time period Eurotrash, but that was not my intention. I was trying to single out 10 productions for being really bad.

Virtually everything in opera today is regietheater, but it would be a mistake to think that I disliked all of them. I loved and adored Partenope which is pure regie.

Saturday, August 20, 2016

I am listening to BBC Proms orchestra The Hallé under Mark Elder in Mahler's Das Lied von der Erde with soloists Alice
Coote and Gregory Kunde. I may possibly love this piece more than any opera. I remember sitting in my living room in Germany and playing it on the piano, even though I'm a terrible pianist. There's been some work on the orchestration. This performance is simply wonderful. Thank you. There is so much depth of understanding.

Friday, August 12, 2016

You will be pleased to know that my top ten Eurotrash productions all come from Europe. This is only suitable. Each of our examples will have a named production designer, also something that happens more often in Europe. Eurotrash is a derogatory term, so these are the worst examples of the broader category called Regietheater.

I suppose a definition is in order. Regietheater or director theater is characterized by staged actions that do not represent the planned actions of the original work. Sometimes there is no relationship at all between the words and the actions.

X

In general it will be a countdown, but I find that I must begin with the most famous of all regie productions, Katharina Wagner's production of her great-grandfather's Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg for Bayreuth. It dates from early in my blogging career, but I watched it only four years ago. Meistersinger is about a Meistersinger guild in Nürnberg in the time of the Renaissance. The hero, Hans Sachs, was the famous master, and the others strove to come up to his standard.

Katharina Wagner has moved the opera to modern times with our over-inflated celebrity status. Do I understand Meistersinger better now? Absolutely not. Do I understand why the street scene is replaced by green representations of composers? No. What do the composers have to do with the plot? The Meistersingers are from the middle class while the winner of the song contest, Walther Stolzing, is a prince who just wants the girl and does not see the reason he needs the singers' guild. In the original version of the opera Hans Sachs talks him into it, but here Walther does not become a Meistersinger and instead runs off to become a rock star, taking Eva with him. This production holds a position in this list because it is so famous.

Could you buy the costumes in a department store? Pretty much.Do you understand the plot any better? Without reading from the designer's notes, the green composers seem meaningless. Since one of them is clearly Verdi, they can't represent die heilige deutsche Kunst (holy German art). The Meistersingers all appear to be artists instead of singers.

This is utterly charming. I am speaking of Hector Berlioz' Béatrice et Bénédict from Glyndebourne. It is based on Shakespeare's Much Ado About Nothing and has a libretto by Berlioz. Beatrice has fallen victim to love, and she is pissed.

It's staged like a movie in black and white with the set pieces mostly made up of gray boxes. Symbolism. You knew that. Beatrice does not wish to be in a box. At the end she appears with her Benedict in one of the boxes and declares that tomorrow they will be enemies again.

It is an opera comique that is nothing like an Italian opera buffa. Frantic tempos are replaced by sweet melodies. Spoken French dialog replaces recitative. There is a buffo bass (Somarone) and a lovely, marvelously comic couple that find each other at the end.

I have long loved Berlioz, read The Aeneid because I knew he loved it. You can feel throughout this excellent opera with duets and trios of female voices, comic choruses and a comic tenor and soprano, how very much he loved Shakespeare.

Philippe Sly looked like the man on the wedding cake when he marries Hero, but it seems he was hired for his beauty and his excellent French because he hardly sings at all.

Agrippina is an opera by Handel that was composed in 1709 for Venice. Why have I never seen or heard of this opera before? I imagine it is very important to know that it was composed for Venice because the commercial theater there was fond of sexual plots. Poppea, La Calisto, that kind of thing. Proper handling of the sexual plot by West Edge Opera has made this an amusing Baroque opera without any distortion of the story. Structurally it is a Neapolitan opera with an endless series of da capo arias. In Venice both women and castrati sang. Shortly after this Handel moved to London. It is important to know that in Venice Agrippina was a hit.

Poppea is the sexual center of attention here as she was in Monteverdi's opera. She tells us how to draw men's attention and lists for us three men who are interested in her: Nero, Ottone and the Emperor Claudio. She is most attracted to Ottone and does not like Claudio at all.

Agrippina has but one objective--she wants her son to become emperor of Rome. She has no interest in her husband's interest in Poppea and instead uses it to manipulate Claudio for her own ends. This is a surprisingly good plot. The opera ends when she wins. Here I want to complain. They flashed words on the surtitles screen explaining what happened to the characters after the opera had ended, but they went by so fast I had no idea what they actually said. A bit slower might be better. Slower or not at all.

One feature of this opera was brief full-on male nudity. Agrippina is
singing, finishes her aria and says to an unseen man that he needs to
get lost. Nude man jumps out of the bed and runs off stage. Full male
nudity is much rarer in the theater than female and is therefore still
entertaining. People entered down the center aisle of the theater,
including Claudio who spoke political phrases in English like an
American politician. I shook his hand as he passed.

The hit tune from this opera is "Come nembo," or at least that's what it's called in Il Trionfo del Tempo e del Disinganno which was composed for Rome. In Agrippina it has a different text. It is known because Cecilia Bartoli has recorded it. Here it is sung by Celine Ricci.

The quality of the singing was excellent throughout, the make or break feature of any Baroque opera performance, with the peak experience coming from Celine Ricci. Here is Celine in her incredible costume and makeup as Nero.

Photo by Cory Weaver.

Neapolitan opera, the kind Handel wrote, is probably the most difficult genre to stage successfully. It works to do silly, mostly irrelevant things as was done in Partenope recently at the San Francisco Opera, and in Agrippina it works just to stage the opera as it is revealed in the libretto.

I won't again try to watch 2 operas in a day, but nevertheless I was very pleased with this.

_____________________________

I so enjoyed writing about and listening to Agrippina from West Edge that I immediately bought the All About History magazine with the featured article about Nero. So what is current thinking about Emperor Nero who apparently killed off all possible successors?

I was especially interested in the current thinking on who burned Rome. The argument goes from one side that Nero burned Rome to kill Christians. The other side say the Christians burned Rome so Nero would take the blame. Crucial factoid in this argument is that the rumor that Nero burned Rome is in fact contemporary with the actual burning. It is possibly tacked on later that it had anything to do with Christians. The article seems to conclude that it was not arson. Just a fire. A really huge fire. The argument against Nero setting it is that his own houses burnt down. This point of view is completely new to me.

I knew the story that Nero fiddled while Rome burned. The curious story is that Nero considered himself an artist and gave performances at an array of venues. His citizens who had formerly loved him came to find him disgusting, a lower class artist type engaged in an activity not suitable for the heir of Julius Caesar.

The Duchess: Laura Bohn
The Maid, and other characters: Emma McNairy
The Duke and other characters: Hadleigh Adams
The Electrician and other characters: Jonathan Blalock

One of the operas for the summer festival of West Edge Opera is Thomas Adès' Powder her Face, a purportedly biographical opera about Margaret Campbell, Duchess of Argyll. The composer waited until her death in 1993 to dig up all this old dirt--the opera dates from 1995. Perhaps it's necessary to be British to fully enjoy this. Everyone but the duchess had very light blond hair.

I'm going to call this as I see it. This was like two different operas: the serious, intensely emotional performance of Laura Bohn, something I might possibly call a masterpiece, and everything else. Let's just say I don't normally watch porn.

Fake sex is only marginally interesting. I tried to figure out what about the opera suggested the sex. The judge comes out and says, "Order, Silence, Justice." Then he says a bunch of other stuff, and then repeats the first three words. The first time he says them they are drawn out and kind of wavy, but the second time he just says them. So the first time the wavy music is used to express someone doing fellatio on him under his judge's robes. So fioratura is sexual. This goes with the Lucia I saw recently. Ho hum.

I don't think I would want to see this opera again, but I'm sort of a fuddy-duddy.

Wednesday, August 03, 2016

A comment mentions drinking songs from operas. Into my brain immediately popped this song. Luckily YouTube reminds me that this is the drinking song from Sigmund Romberg's The Student Prince where I played a student when I was in high school.

Monday, August 01, 2016

Not to worry. The abandoned train station in Oakland where West Edge Opera holds their performances has been fixed up some. I just liked the picture.

West Edge Opera has already announced their season for 2017. As usual, it will consist of three operas from three opera periods.

Hamlet, 1868, by Ambroise Thomas. This opera comes with two possible endings: tragic and happy. In English speaking countries you will usually see the tragic ending. Emma McNairy will sing Ophelie.

The Chastity Tree or L'arbore di Diana, 1797, by Vicente Martín y Soler. The exciting feature of this selection is that the libretto is by Lorenzo da Ponte. The composer is a Spanish contemporary of Mozart.

Frankenstein or The Modern Prometheus, 1990, by Libby Larsen. I must make a correction. The program says that this is being presented in recognition of the 100th anniversary of Mary Shelley's novel, but the correct statement is the 200th anniversary, since the novel was first published in 1818.

For serious opera freaks we love them because they rarely dip into the top 50. Only Hamlet is an opera that I have seen before.